The largest recorded epidemic of the lethal Ebola virus is spreading in West Africa.

It has killed more than 660 people in four countries with raging fever, vomiting, diarrhea and uncontrolled bleeding, including a Liberian who died after flying to Nigeria last week.

So could it arrive in the United States?

“It’s very unlikely,” says Denise Grady, a science reporter who has written extensively on Ebola and similar diseases.

The Centers for Disease Control are urging carriers to be on the alert for ill passengers, and the disease can’t spread from someone who is asymptomatic. It can also be halted by preventing any contact with an infected person’s body fluids, Ms. Grady says.

“If it did come here,” she says, “standard infection control would be really likely to stop it.”

• The view from Gaza.

Twenty days into the Israeli operation against Hamas, deaths on the Israeli side are nearing 50, and those on the Palestinian side number 1,023 — hundreds of them civilian.

We asked our correspondent Ben Hubbard, who is in Gaza, why the rising death toll isn’t enough to stop the fighting. An informal lull on Monday was shattered by deadly strikes in Gaza City and rockets fired at Israel.

“It’s very difficult for people outside of Gaza to understand the amount of hatred that decades and decades of fighting with Israel have left among the population as a whole,” Mr. Hubbard tells us.

“There’s so much bad blood that most Gazans consider resistance the appropriate response.”

“What Gazans see first and foremost is the destruction caused by the Israeli response,” Mr. Hubbard says.

• Paying one way or another.

Russia isn’t likely to accept an international tribunal’s order to pay $50 billion to the stockholders of the Yukos oil company.

The seizure of Yukos, which was run by the oligarch Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky until 2003, was a crucial moment in Vladimir V. Putin’s tightening control.

Still, the ruling will have major implications for the Russian economy, says Andrew Kramer, our correspondent in Moscow.

“The pressure on the economy will come more subtly than a direct payout,” Mr. Kramer says.

“Russia under President Putin not only renationalized Yukos,” he tells us, “but brought many other sectors of the economy back under state control.”

Those industries include banking, airplane manufacturing and shipbuilding.

“The large Russian state sector will now have to be continually on guard,” he says.

• A sure thing.

As we mentioned last week, movie studios have been weeding out potential flops and releasing fewer films, leading to a slower box office this summer.

There’s one sign the strategy is working: “Lucy” — Scarlett Johansson’s sci-fi thriller — took in $44 million over the weekend.

“The audience is a little hungry, as the summer has had some thin weekends,” says Michael Cieply, our Hollywood reporter.

Universal promoted “Lucy” heavily, he says, “pegged squarely to the action-heroine side of Ms. Johansson.”

Just months ago, she was part of the blockbuster success of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which raked in $259 million at the domestic box office.

“It’s kind of like having Robert Downey Jr. in an action film just after ‘Iron Man 2,'” Mr. Cieply says, “which, come to think of it, is exactly what Warner had with ‘Due Date,’ and that did well, too.”

The documentary “Fallen City” looks at the present, past and future of one hard-hit riverside town, where two-thirds of the residents were killed and 80 percent of the buildings were destroyed (PBS, check local listings).

• OMG, another red-carpet night.

Kelly Osbourne hosts the 2014 Young Hollywood Awards, celebrating the new stars of film, music and television (CW, 8 p.m. Eastern).

Female filmmakers focus their lenses on women in sports. The week begins with “Rowdy Ronda Rousey,” the No. 1 female mixed-martial arts fighter in the world (streaming on espnW.com).

If you’re staying up …

On “The Daily Show”: Sonia Nazario, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of “Enrique’s Journey,” about a Honduran boy’s search for his mother in the United States (11 p.m. Eastern, Comedy Central).

“The Tonight Show”: James Franco; the actor Chadwick Boseman, who plays James Brown in the new film “Get on Up”; and a performance by Jenny Lewis, whose new album, “The Voyager,” comes out Tuesday (11:35 p.m. Eastern, NBC).

“Late Show With David Letterman”: John C. Reilly of the forthcoming “Guardians of the Galaxy”; the actress Rachelle Lefevre of “Under the Dome”; Conor Oberst performs. (11:35 p.m. Eastern, NBC).

TOMORROW

• Love letters of a future president.

About 1,000 pages of notes between Warren G. Harding and his mistress, Carrie Fulton Phillips, will be opened to the public by the Library of Congress.

They were written between 1910 and 1920, mostly while Harding was in the Senate. He ended the affair before his inauguration as president in 1921.